Construction software, five years on one codebase
78,500 hours across two construction products, both still running. The larger is a soil and aggregates marketplace we have staffed since January 2022 — a Laravel core, a Vue front end, and native apps on both stores for the people using it on site.
What we take on in construction
A marketplace two sides of an industry depend on
Our largest construction engagement is a marketplace for soil and aggregates: 75,600 hours since January 2022, 41 people on it across 57 active months, still running. Marketplaces are unforgiving in this sector because both sides are on a site rather than at a desk, and a booking that fails at 6am is a truck that does not move.
Field apps that have to work on a bad connection
Native on both platforms — 11,700 hours of Android and 11,500 of iOS on that one product. Native rather than cross-platform because the job needs the camera, location and behaviour that survives losing signal halfway through a form, which is the daily reality of a site.
A backend that has carried five years of change
A Laravel core with 40,100 hours behind it and a Vue front end with 18,100. Five years of pricing rules, dispatch logic and integrations accumulate in a way that punishes a team which has not lived with them — which is the argument for staffing this work with people who stay.
Inheriting a system the original team has left
The common construction brief we get: a working product, nobody who built it still around, and a roadmap that has stalled. That starts as an audit and a map of what calls what and what runs on a schedule, before anyone touches a line.
How a construction engagement starts
- Days 1–2
A call, then a written profile of the people you need. If the brief is a mobile app for crews and a web platform for the office, we will say which of the two actually gates your launch rather than staffing both at once because both were asked for.
- Days 3–10
Either a match from people rolling off other engagements, or a role opens. Construction work here is staffed from the PHP, Vue, iOS and Android practices; the PHP family runs a median of 26 days from opening a role to a signed offer across 12 hires.
- First week on the project
Get it running locally, read the schema, and come back with the three things that will slow the team down. On a system with five years of pricing and dispatch rules in it, that week is most of the value of the first month.
- Every month after
Hours logged, published the way they are on this page, and a team you can scale down without renegotiating anything.
How the team is shaped
A standing team on one product
What the large engagement has been for five years: backend, front end, both mobile platforms and QA, with a project manager on the client’s standups. The point is continuity — 31 of the 41 people who have worked on it logged more than 40 hours, which is what a team rather than a rotation looks like.
One or two engineers into an existing team
Where you have engineering management and need the hands, most often on the mobile side or on a backend nobody currently owns.
Take over and stabilise
A defined engagement to inherit a system whose team has gone: document what it does, make changes safe, and hand back an honest list of what it costs to keep running.
Where the team sits, and how people get here
Where the team sits
More than half our engineers now sit in Latin America, with most of the rest in Eastern Europe. Construction runs on an early clock — the day starts before the office does — and the overlap matters most for the things that block a site rather than a sprint.
How people get here
This work is staffed from the PHP, Vue, iOS and Android practices, hired through the same funnel as everyone else: roughly one hire per 103 applications in the PHP family and one per 63 in Vue. What the large engagement shows is not the filter but the retention — 31 of the 41 people on it logged more than 40 hours, across 57 months.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much construction work have you really done?
What is in the stack?
Why native apps rather than cross-platform?
Do you know construction, or just software?
Can you name the client?
What would you turn down?
Ready to get started?
Contact us at [email protected] or fill out the form
